I'm experiencing a major problem with this game for a while now: It crashes my entire PC! And that without any warning or anything. Its like *zap* - the screen turns black and my PC reboots. It almost always happenes when I'm detonating a couple C4s for example. But not only then. There are several occasions when it happened. I bought this game a long time ago and played it a alot already. I'm almost sure that this problem first occured after i switched my graphics card to an NVIDIA 580 GTX. Before I was using a 260 GTX. I have already tried updating my BIOS and NVIDIA drivers. But without any success.

The 580GTX I'm using has 3GB DRR5 Ram and my OS is Windows 7 64bit SP1. If you want to know any other specs, please ask!

I'm not very knowedgable on these matters so I'm afraid I can't help a lot, but if it ran ok before than it's probably a compatibility problem with your new card? Or maybe you could try verifying Steam cache files?

OK this is interesting too. I just tried playing Serious Sam HD: The first encounter and it happened too... Games like Counter Strike: GO, Portal 2, Just Cause 2 or RAGE for example run without any problems though.

Do you have a video card monitor running? Wondering if it happens on games that the GPU runs at or close to wide open (99%) and doesn't do it when the card doesn't have to work hard. What are the temps for GPU and CPU? SS 3 will make even a GTX 680 work hard.

Yes this sounds like underpowering. Blowing up a couple of C4s at the same time is very intensive both for CPU and GPU. Though not that underpowering symptoms can also be caused by contact resistance in loose connectors. We have a couple of notes about things like this in the FAQ.

OK, i have just put in a new PSU (be quiet! Pure Power L7 @ 630W) and tested SS3 with it for about an hour. I blew up about 20 C4s at once among some other CPU/GPU intense things. My PC did not crash a single time during that hour, so I think its safe to say, that the problem is solved! Thanks again everyone!

Though note that underpowering symptoms can also be caused by contact resistance in loose connectors. We have a couple of notes about things like this in the FAQ.

Also, just because a PSU is declared 650watt, it doesn't mean it can pull it. It's hard to tell.

What's certain is that a clean instant reboot is most probably not a software error, but a hardware glitch. Software (e.g. driver error) would usually go at least into blue screen, if not just a crash.